Focus: It's About Time

If better results are what we're after, focus is the indispensable
key.

If you listen at all to educators these days, you hear the word "focus"
a lot. I've recently visited with people from several districts across
the country, and their frustration was often expressed to me as a
perceived lack of focus. They were frustrated by the failure of their
school organizations to sustain a clear, coherent program of action
toward a manageable number of goals. They were tired of constantly
shifting emphases; of being pulled, sometimes at a moment's notice, in
brand-new directions; of being asked to add yet another activity to an
already full plate. These schoolpeople knew what we all should
know--that a lack of focus wreaks havoc with effective, systematic
school improvement efforts.

"Focus" is a simple notion, but a difficult reality to attain. If
better results are what we're after, though, focus is the indispensable
key. It can give us fewer dropouts, higher achievement, a more
productive, engaging, and inviting climate for students and teachers.
All of this is within our reach the moment our schools decide to select
a limited number of improvement goals and then work regularly and
doggedly toward their achievement--all the while protecting them from
potential derailments and distractions. The simple, happy fact is that,
if we do these things sensibly and intelligently, better results are
all but inevitable.

But typically we don't. The problem isn't that we can't palpably
improve our schools, even in the short term. It is that we haven't yet
learned the importance of maintaining a productive relationship between
time and effort. If we have learned anything from the "fifth
discipline"--systems thinking--we ought to know that this is one of its
first principles. The failure to be focused is a systems issue; it is a
time issue. Time and its best use are the essence of focus, of
optimizing a system toward the results we want.

Focus means being organized. The difficulty schools have being
focused touches on our failure in this area. Some people in the field
have recently been saying that schools are not, in fact,
"organizations," but only convenient locations where freelance
educators happen to be employed. This is a major part of the problem;
focus requires a regular and relentless insistence on coordination and
organization of effort. On one level, schools are fairly organized: The
buses run; the classes get scheduled; events are planned. This is no
mean accomplishment. But in the instructional sphere, and as regards
school improvement planning, we still have a long way to go. If we are
serious about engaging and educating greater numbers of children, we
can no longer afford this. In the current chaotic climate, the enemies
of focus flourish.

Let's look at some principles that can act as antidotes to the
common systemic impediments that kill momentum and derail productive,
results-oriented efforts. Again, focus is fundamentally a time
issue--our use or abuse of the single most precious resource in school
improvement.

Facts feed focus: The importance of reviewing data at the
school level. Improvement planning should begin with data, with a
conscientious review of the facts of student performance. Nothing
frustrates effective planning more than the absence of this first
step. It may even be advisable to review data by grade level or
academic department. The most ill-fated improvement efforts I've seen
occur when (1) operational goals are established by the district
rather the school, or (2) they are established by the site council
without first reviewing school performance data. In both cases, the
problem is the same. We bypass the only information that can compel
passionate, targeted improvement effort: school-level information
about where improvement is most needed. We inadvertently create
solutions in search of a problem.

The moment we add more goals than time reasonably permits, we
engage in denial and get what we have too often gotten: lots of
unfocused activity but not much in the way of results.

To avoid this, the school itself should be the primary locus of
improvement. Once the data are reviewed, the school is in the best
position to determine its priorities and allocate time resources for
collaboration and staff development. Directives from the district and
the school board should be kept to a minimum. Should the district
provide guidelines and parameters for the site-based team, like an
insistence that the school improvement team review data and provide a
rationale for how priorities were determined? Absolutely. District
leadership and oversight are essential. But the district should
carefully avoid mandating goals or initiatives that can encroach on the
school's very limited time for pursuing its carefully selected
priorities.

Unfortunately (and often with the best intentions), many districts
continue to set goals impulsively from afar. This all but guarantees
failure--not to mention the perception among teachers that the
organization doesn't know what it wants. And this helps explain why so
many year-end school reports are long on verbiage and short on
results.

Build in a gatekeeping system. Time must be budgeted
almost like money. Money goes only so far, and so does time. You
can't buy a new Mercedes with the same amount that you'd spend on a
used Chevy. Likewise, you can't pursue five major goals with the same
time allotment needed to pursue two. Schools should make the
intelligent use of time their highest priority. We can talk all day
about how precious and limited time is, but until we begin to more
formally budget it, keeping careful accounts of how much time we have
against what we wish to accomplish, we will continue to squander time
and effort.

Thomas Donahoe talks about a school in California where time and
goals are very carefully apportioned at the beginning of the year on
the basis of selected priorities. Any changes or additions to the goals
after the beginning of the school year require a consensus of the
school community--as well as the removal of one goal to make room for
the new one. This may sound radical to some, but it demonstrates a
clear, hard-headed sense of the value of time. We should routinely ask
ourselves such questions as: How many early-release days and faculty
meetings are there on the school's annual schedule? How can we take
maximum advantage of this time for staff development that aligns with
school goals and--even more important--for regularly scheduled, focused
collaboration relative to each improvement goal? Before the school year
even begins, we should establish time for these meetings, taking into
account the time necessary to conduct and score assessments, collect
and analyze data on progress. If these are new processes for staff
members, adequate time is even more paramount.

The moment we add more goals than time reasonably permits, we engage
in denial and get what we have too often gotten: lots of unfocused
activity but not much in the way of results.

Conduct a rigorous review of all meetings and a campaign to
dramatically improve their quality. Too many meetings in school
organizations are manifestly unfocused affairs. Yet the quality of
team, department, grade-level, school, and district meetings will
make or break a successful improvement effort. For this reason,
meetings must be subjected to a rigorous review and
reconception.

At most school meetings, there is scant time reserved for
instructional improvement. How much of it gets appropriated to the
achievement of the organization's established goals? Specifically, how
much time, at every level, is spent sharing the practical strategies
and on-the-ground expertise that bear directly on the attainment of
school goals? How much time is spent solving instructional or
logistical problems that emerge? This is the stuff of improvement.

Focus is simplicity, clarity—a function of what we attempt
to pursue as much as the amount of time we allot to pursuing
it.

Sad to say, most school employees are relatively illiterate in the
basics of effective meetings. Educators tell me that most meetings they
attend are characterized by rambling and digression--with no clear
instructions for action or follow-up. This tramples on every basic
principle of effective meetings, the essence of which is to stay
focused on what most clearly benefits students.

Schools have yet to learn what any well-run business learned long
ago: Effective meetings are not "down time," but the heart and soul of
a learning organization. Every employee should receive training in the
tools of focused, creative collaboration: brainstorming, time limits,
posting ideas, ending meetings with a course of action and a future
date for reviewing these efforts against desired results. This should
be one of the district's highest priorities.

Abolish amorphous goals and amorphous research. Focus is
simplicity, clarity--a function of what we attempt to pursue
as much as the amount of time we allot to pursuing it. Many of the
improvement goals we establish are themselves the enemy of focus. In
their best-selling book The Wisdom of Teams, Jon Katzenbach
and Douglas Smith tell us what so many have experienced: that goals
which can't be measured are only "delusional goals." Without the
wholesome pressure that measurement exerts, focus is lost and effort
dissipates as people lose their way.

Complicating things further, many of these "goals" are pursued on
the basis of supposed "research." In many cases, what is called
research is in fact interesting but only partially substantiated theory
or speculation--never tested in a classroom. As often as not,
"research" may mean that a topic was written about in an academic or
educational journal--as though that, in itself, were a reliable basis
for classroom instruction. We should be far more circumspect about how
we select our goals; we should be just as circumspect about the
research that informs our efforts to achieve those goals. And if we
want students to learn more, we would do well to rely far more on
research that has been tested in the classroom with measurable
results.

Does that mean we ignore all else? Not at all. Some of the best
ideas we know began in the qualitative and theoretical realm. We should
avail ourselves of them. But we should not ignore the best classroom
research in favor of the premature pursuit of attractive theories that
have not yet been classroom-proven.

Assessment is one of the primary engines of focus. We
should know by now that quality curriculum isn't enough. What gets
measured--not what is in the curriculum guide--is what gets done.
Consider David Berliner's interesting discovery that, in the same
school, one teacher taught 27 times as much science as a teacher down
the hall. If we do it right, what gets assessed is what gets taught,
discussed, and focused on.

Districts like Frederick County in Maryland, Glendale Union and Mesa
Unified in Arizona, the Clovis, Calif., schools, and the Pomperaug
school district in Connecticut don't rely on a common curriculum. They
get great results because their manifold efforts are focused on common,
consistent student assessments. They have their eyes on a common prize:
real, palpable gains in both standardized and performance assessments.
Teachers in these schools exercise a measure of instructional autonomy,
but there is no confusion about the focus of instruction, whether in
reading, writing, or chemistry.

Perhaps the greatest dividend of common assessment is the
opportunity it creates for focused, effective interaction. Dan Lortie
found that teachers need a "semantically potent common language" to be
able to learn from each other. Common assessments provide that in
spades. Without the reference point that common standards and
assessments provide, examining and improving the effectiveness of our
school systems will be a Sisyphean task.

Follow the time and money. If we want to know an
organization's real vs. its expressed priorities, that's easy: Look
at where the organization spends its time and money. Is the
expenditure clearly and carefully targeted toward clear, intelligible
priorities, rather than on whatever comes along or sounds attractive?
Are time and money spent to acquire, adapt, or develop common
instructional goals and assessments? Does the organization, at every
level, exercise discipline in ensuring that conversation is devoted
to gauging and even promoting progress toward those goals?

Yes, organizational efficiency does require planning, consensus, and
even compromise in deciding what we do and when. But the payoff cannot
be gainsaid.

We've just entered spring, the season of annual improvement
planning. Let's resolve to do it right this year--to treat both time
and people with the respect they deserve. With a lot of focus and a
little luck, 1997 could be a very good year for schools.

By
Mike Schmoker

Mike Schmoker is the coordinator of federal and state projects
for the Lake Havasu public schools in Lake Havasu City, Ariz.
His latest book is Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement
(Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997).